The headline of the release that accompanied LA’s budget talked about “No Surprises”. And I wasn’t surprised that the estimate of $1.93 billion was, by LA’s admission, conservative. That’s what Olympic bids always do when it comes to sponsorship forecasts. But I was surprised at just how conservative it was – in my view overly conservative.To put this into context.The US is the world's largest advertising and sports marketing economy, and in turn its media and brands are by far the biggest investors in Olympic media and sponsorships.

So I was expecting to see LA estimate the biggest-ever domestic sponsorship Games revenue.

But that's not how it played out.

Yes, the LA estimate would be a record for any completed Games to date. But even allowing for price elasticity of demand, having already signed 15 Tier One and 27 Tier Two partners, Tokyo 2020 appears to have already generated well over $2 billion from domestic sponsorship given its rate card of $128 million and $51 million respectively for Tier One and Tier Two deals.

So that's the new benchmark, from an ad market that's 25% the size of that of the US.

Another benchmark. The LA estimate is less than double London 2012’s final total of just over $1 billion, which was generated by a much, much smaller ad market - 12% of the size of the US - in the teeth of a recession.

I suspect that the two other models LA used would have reflected a similar scenario.

But LA didn’t need to run the risk of over-promising and under-delivering. A conservative $1.93 billion works for LA’s no risk budget, and even at the lower end of the scale, still comfortably eclipses the $1.086 billion from domestic sponsorship estimated by Paris, its chief rival in the 2024 race.